Our favorite “forgotten tech”—from BeOS to Zip Drives

We all know about the gadgets that get showered with constant praise—the icons, the segment leaders, and the game changers. Tech history will never forget the Altair 8800, the Walkman, the BlackBerry, and the iPhone.

But people do forget—and quickly—about the devices that failed to change the world: the great ideas doomed by mediocre execution, the gadgets that arrived before the market was really ready, or the technologies that found their stride just as the world was pivoting to something else.

In our last piece on gadget history, we profiled the worst products the Ars staff had ever used. Here, we celebrate the best products that are sliding slowly into the memory hole. But when they first appeared, we loved them.

Computer hardware

The Iomega Zip Drive

In the beginning was the floppy disk. It was eight inches across, and it was... floppy. Over time, the floppy shrank to 5-1/4”, then down to 3-1/2” (gaining a plastic outer shell in the process). It eventually offered 1.44MB of portable storage. And computer geeks saw that it was good.

But then the hard disk began to grow. Backing up important files became more of a hassle as hard disks passed the 200MB mark. After I bought my first Mac desktop (a clone, actually), I found that transferring my files from an old PowerBook 145 to my new Umax SuperMac J700 was a hassle, as was ensuring that all of my important documents were backed up. Enter the Zip Drive. Bigger and thicker than the 3-1/2” floppy drive, Zip disks held a whopping 100MB of data (they would later come in 250MB and 750MB sizes).

The Zip Drive was introduced in 1994, and I purchased an external SCSI model (and I terminated my SCSI chain properly, dammit!) within a couple years of its arrival on the market. Zip disks weren’t terribly cheap at $20 each, but I eventually amassed a sizable collection and backed up to them (semi) regularly.

By the latter half of the 1990s, OEMs like Apple and Dell offered Zip Drives as options on their machines, and I briefly owned a PowerBook 1400c with a Zip Drive module. But the Zip’s reign as the portable mass storage of choice did not last. By the end of the 1990s, CD-R and CD-RW drives were increasingly available; after I used Zip drives to move files from a PowerMac G3/266 to my new PowerMac G4/400, the Zip disks were stored away in a drawer. There they remained until I moved a few years ago, when they were put out in the alley along with the other electronic detritus I had accumulated over the nine years I lived in that house.

Nowadays, I can stuff a 32GB USB thumb drive in my pocket, making the bulky 100MB Zip disks seem even more antiquated. But for a few short years, the Zip Drive hit a sweet spot in the market, which is why I still have fond memories of it. (Eric Bangeman)

Magneto-optical drives

The number of instances where my tastes overlapped with those of the late Steve Jobs are pretty limited, but we did share one conviction: we both thought magneto-optical drives were a really good idea. Jobs actually made them the default removable storage media for some early models of NeXT computers, a legacy that lives on only through the spinning-beachball-of-death that persists in OS X. For me, they were the answer to a rather obscure issue: how do you keep an ever-expanding collection of microscope images organized and archived?

Back in my research days, I could generate hundreds of high-resolution images in a matter of hours—then do the same thing the next day. In the mid-'90s, this created all sorts of problems. Desktop hard drives hadn't reached the point where you could just leave every image you ever took on a single machine. Hard drives failed, so I needed a backup system. Not every machine would have all the software you'd need to work with the images, so you often needed to shuffle hundreds of megabytes between desktops.

Writable CDs hit the market around this time, but the burning software not exactly user friendly, and the discs created an organizational nightmare. A given day's work might involve imagining three different experiments. You were likely to repeat all of them at different points over the next few months. If you were good about archiving to CD, you'd end up with dozens of disk with bits and pieces of different experiments scattered on each one. Actually finding the bit you wanted later was not much fun.

MO disks seemed to offer a solution for all of these issues. The 5 1/4" versions had multi-gigabyte capacities but were removable, meaning you could shift the data to any machine with a drive hooked to it. They were also re-writable, meaning that whenever you got more material from a given project, you could just drop that into the same folder that contained the rest of that work. And they were archival quality, guaranteed to retain data for decades.

Plus, all the alternatives were much, much worse. Iomega was the king of portable media at the time, but people in my building were losing data left and right to the "click of death."

About the only thing obviously wrong with them was that MO drives were slow—but less obvious things took their toll. The tech never went mainstream, so both the drives and media ended up stuck at the high prices typical for a niche product. Newer, higher capacity drives were often promised but ended up badly delayed. The hardware that did make it to market was often poorly supported and suffered from flaky drivers.

With today's cheap, massive hard drives and cheap, fast networking, I'm not sure MO drives would be a great option now even if they had caught on at the time. But their fringe status is probably a worse fate than the technology deserved. Still, I hear that, like Spinal Tap, they're big in Japan. (John Timmer)

Vadem Clio C-1050

The Vadem Clio shows off its many moods and screen positions, transforming from sub-notebook to tablet.

Windows CE gets no respect. But in 1998, the Vadem Clio looked like the future—and in many ways, it still does. The MIPS-based portable computer weighed 3 pounds, had a battery life of as much as 12 hours, and was the first really successful convertible tablet/notebook, at least from a design standpoint. Its blessing and curse was that it was built for Windows CE.

Microsoft heavily promoted a class of devices built on the Windows CE 3.0 H/PC platform called “PC companions.” The draw of Windows CE to device manufacturers was, among other things, its modularity; it allowed them to bolt on functionality specific to their hardware as well as other software. In Vadem’s case, that included CalliGrapher, handwriting recognition software from Vadem’s ParaGraph subsidiary, that made it the best pen tablet of its time. It allowed pen input directly into the Windows CE version of Microsoft Word, and was good enough that I could take cursive or print notes on the screen with such a low error rate that I seldom needed to correct them.

The design of the Clio, created by frogdesign based on ideas from Vadem's engineering director Edmond Ku, was innovation in itself. It was designed to be carried, with an almost organic shape that made it easy to hold with one hand and write on in its tablet form. Unlike the other notebook-style devices that were its contemporaries, it had a screen mounted on two arms that could rotate 180 degrees on a pair of carbon-fiber reinforced arms, allowing it to flip around and lay flat, tablet-style, while concealing its keyboard, or to be rotated into any position while open for use with its built-in keyboard. That made it ideal for punching out a breaking story on a long airplane flight sitting behind someone with a reclined seat, or filing a story by e-mail from a phone booth that had an RJ-11 plug to jack its 56kbps modem into.

Considering that my “real” notebook computer was an Apple PowerBook Duo (see our “Worst Gadgets” story), the Clio saved the day for me on a regular basis.

Apple PowerBook 1400

Back when I was college, from 2000-2004, it's hard to believe that laptops were still relatively uncommon for classroom notetaking, even at a large school like UC Berkeley. WiFi was just coming out, and certain classes taught in certain lecture halls could be watched online. I had a trusty laptop that was even pretty old by 2000, the PowerBook 1400.

Beyond being a decent laptop for its era, the 1400 had two features that were pretty neat, and I've been surprised that they never quite caught on. The first was functional: expandable drive bays. On the bottom of the laptop, two modular slots allowed for an extra battery, a disk drive, a CD drive, or even a Zip drive, which was awesome in that pre-USB stick era. Both slots were hot-swappable when the computer was asleep, of course.

The second, which was more flashy, was the BookCover feature, a removeable piece of clear plastic on the top of the laptop that let users put in different patterns, art, stickers, or otherwise personalize their own computer. While I didn't know it at the time, ClarisWorks had a feature that let users create and print their own, based on an included template that was bundled with the software as an "extra." (Cyrus Farivar)

I loved Omega. Used to submit designs to the Illuminati BBS every week.

The week Omega originally shipped was right when hurricane Hugo hit the east coast. I literally got my copy the day before. Power was out for 2 weeks. It was the most frustrating 2 weeks of my life. I spent the whole time reading the manual and coding tanks by kerosene lamp on a legal pad.

Omega. I'll have to look into that. I cut my teeth on the C64 and thought my background of esoteric and forgotten gaming gems was pretty thorough but I don't recall that one. Interesting. I"ll be looking that up today.

Also, totally had a hacked out TI-89 (as opposed to the 83 in article). Give I was a bit older than the general crowd in college at the time this gadget totally made me give a bit F-U to the whole show your work concept. Use technology, don't replicate it. (yes, I understand the foundation concept though)

My mom's Powerbook 1400 had a rotating set of covers that she would swap in depending on her mood. Her Bernoulli and Zip drives were much cherished, and she was one of the last to make the conversion to using CD-Rs as data storage.

Learning how to program a TI-83 was one of the things our high school trig teacher taught us. He was so surprised when every single student in the class created a "list of trig identities" program to use on the memorization part of the tests. It became policy for all the math and science teachers to walk around the classroom performing factory resets on every graphing calculator in the room before a test.

Hah, yes, the Zip drive, I must have it somewhere in a box still. It was a godsend when it appeared though, suddenly significant amounts of data was portable and, click of death notwithstanding, far more reliably than with those blasted floppy disks.

Hah, yes, the Zip drive, I must have it somewhere in a box still. It was a godsend when it appeared though, suddenly significant amounts of data was portable and, click of death notwithstanding, far more reliably than with those blasted floppy disks.

I also loved Omega. I remember the disappointment when I couldn't find anyone else to write tanks to fight me. I ended up getting it for free from a friend whose parents basically bought him every game he ever asked for. He saw this awesome "Omega Cybertank" game and asked for it, they was horribly disappointed.

I was not.

However besides achieving Omega level clearance a few times, I never managed to find friends to fight.

I did manage to set up some matches with my friend in P-Robots a Pascal based version which just showed ANSI terminal graphics of your tanks. It also was faster and had more options and we both already knew Pascal from CS class in High School. By then though, my OMEGA years were behind me and I was just trying to recapture that era in my life.

I always tried to make the most sophistocated tank I could and my friend always made the dumbest tank he could to foil mine. It was actually a pretty good example for me years later. "Just because it is more complex and has more features, doesn't mean it is the best solution." His tank generally ran straight to the center of the arena and then flickered its stealth on and off while finding me and taking pot shots.

Magneto-optical drives. Sigh... I wish we weren't still using these. We use them for long-term document storage, but they're still accessed frequently enough to make it a hassle. It's also very slow, and the unit they're kept in takes up about half a rack of space. If anything, this article is all the more reason to finally do away with them.

Wow. I touched almost all the tech except the Powerbook and the Nintendo. Such fun times.

I recall when the Zip drives came out Syquest released the ez135, which as it's name implies stored 35 MORE MEGABYTES than the Zip. I thought I was so smart for choosing the superior hardware and almost got a write up in the tech column of the NY Times Computer section for my explanation of why the price per megabyte was an important deciding factor in Syquest over Zip.the benefits of the Syquest over the Zip. (If only I had checked my e-mail on vacation with my dial up modem and Compaq H/PC!)

However like so many others, I learned the hard way that 'best' doesn't always trump 'popular' or 'first to market' and the Syquest died a painful slow death.

I actually did use a PC-Card Modem in my Compaq HPC and I could do basic dial up Internet with it and get e-mail. It was handy but a bit painful to use.

Count me as another fan of Omega: I got my copy in the $5 bin at computer store, and played it for years. I had a 10+ page program for a tank that never moved. (But could take out 3 of 8 standard tanks even if they all started inside firing range.)

I never quite got my networked swarm tanks to work - if I had a way to run it, I'd probably still be working on that...

TI-92, TI-89, TI-83+, and a god forsaken TI-81 withOUT the damn battery backup. Supposedly if you swapped the AAA batteries out one at a time fast enough, you wouldn't lose the memory but I never managed it.

OMEGA! I never met anyone besides myself that played Omega...thank you Ars for the reminder.

If I could find it, I'd play it right now. I think I was 13 years old playing that on a C64, and while I learned to code at 11 on my Vic 20 with BASIC, Omega got me absolutely hooked. I wonder if my career would have turned out as it has were it not for Omega.

Now, I am off to find an emulator and this game...because I must play.

I just used my N810 last week to make a gigapixel image of the Grand Canyon. Using a home-brewed interface and http://www.papywizard.org/ software.

Every time I break it out, I pine for the days of having a full-on Linux system in my pocket. Still trying to come up with a secure way to transfer files between my Android phone and my NAS. With Maemo it was simple, just install SSH and use SSHFS. Not so much with Android, at least last time I investigated it.

Having -a- modular bay still isn't terribly uncommon for business class laptops at least. The Powerbook 1400 was a bit odd in that it had two in the size machine that it is.

The NES-101, like a lot of other revised systems, is arguably worse for playing games unless you mod it. It only has RF out (unlike the Japanese revision that shares most of the case, the AV Famicom). The toaster NES has composite out.

While the interchangeable covers of the Powerbook 1400 were neat, swappable drive bays were common on laptops at the time, and still are in some models, although they are becoming rare as removable media becomes obsolete and batteries become non-removable.

And the Powerbook 1400 in some ways represented the nadir of Apple in the '90s... They were extremely slow, running the not-so-well optimized System 7 on weak and low-clocked PowerPC 603e CPUs, and there were plenty of build issues (creaky plastic, poor fit and finish). Apple roared back to life in the next few years with a series of increasingly excellent G3 based models and rapidly improving software (System 8.5 was a huge step past System 7, performance and stability wise), but the 1400 was pretty forgettable.

That changed with the N800. Like the 770, it had a full-fledged browser (Opera 8 with Flash 7 support)

Not 100% sure but i think that by the time the N800 launched, Nokia had moved to using Mozilla Microb as the web rendering engine for the Maemo browser. This was an effort that started late in the 770 lifespan, and i think carried on into the N900.

Btw, i think that Sony could have made their MD much more popular if the MDHD had been able to read unconverted MP3 straight off the data partition. But back then Sony as a company was torn. While the Playstations, made by their computer division, could play MP3s or even boot Linux, the MD and their other mediaplayers where saddled by heavy DRM thanks to being made by their home entertainment division. Said division was under the thumb of Sony Music and Sony Pictures to make sure the content from the latter two could not be copied using Sony products.

The first was functional: expandable drive bays. On the bottom of the laptop, two modular slots allowed for an extra battery, a disk drive, a CD drive, or even a Zip drive, which was awesome in that pre-USB stick era.

That actually was around quite a while (longer than Zip drives). The very first laptop I purchased back in ~1998 has this feature as well. Actually, the one I bought was the focus of a class action lawsuit about battery life and I got a free peripheral out of it. I went for the 800MB HDD (compared to the 500MB one it came with). I had Linux on one and windows on the other HDD... dual booting was pretty solid But also you could get extra batteries, etc. That tech has been around for a good while. I'm pretty sure the laptop we bought four years ago has a bay that can have either an optical drive or a batter.

Quote:

The second, which was more flashy, was the BookCover feature, a removeable piece of clear plastic on the top of the laptop that let users put in different patterns, art, stickers, or otherwise personalize their own computer.

That's still around, too. You can buy (or have made) custom skins for your laptop or just about anything else. Just a random Google brought up this from Dell: http://dell.skinit.com/ I've seen similar for Apple laptops. You can get it done to your car, even.

Sight... The TI-83... After all these years, I still love it. I discovered programming with this device one day I was sick and bored. The language was Basic, and creating a program was trivial and far easier that on the later models. I made my own version of Conway's game of life that day but I did not grasp immediatly the potential of the Pentium II PC in our living room. Today the calculator is still in my office for everyday calculator tasks.

See, woodland pagan rites were perfectly sufficient for hardware situations, such as terminating your SCSI chain, But if you had number of different types of devices, say a scanner, a cdrom drive, a removable hard drive, and an internal hard drive, and you wanted them to work in your system, well that required actual necromancy, and prayers for support from your various device vendors and OS providers.

Corel, selling a graphics product, realized that all these items were essentials to their customers, and took it upon themselves to write and sell an omnibus package of SCSI drivers supporting most of the major manufacturers' devices on the major operating systems.

One thing that does confuse me though: why is the TI-83 considered to be "forgotten tech"? Some colleges still require that for their math courses even today.

I had the same reaction ... how can something be "forgotten tech" if it is still used today in most classrooms?

Additionally, there is no real substitute to a TI-83 (or their competitor calculators).

Of course not! After all, it still represents the pinnacle of calculator technologyhttp://xkcd.com/768/

But seriously though. It's amazing how many people refuse to move on from the TI-83. My 9th grade math class was the first and last class to be introduced to the TI-89. I got a kick out of it, and I still use it (free, yet sloppy integration. Hooray!), but a lot of other students and math teachers looked at it as if it were the bane of their existence.

I'm in college now, and I still can't let others use my calculator without them saying "How do I use this", with degrees of surprise and annoyance on their face.

I just used my N810 last week to make a gigapixel image of the Grand Canyon. Using a home-brewed interface and http://www.papywizard.org/ software.

Every time I break it out, I pine for the days of having a full-on Linux system in my pocket. Still trying to come up with a secure way to transfer files between my Android phone and my NAS. With Maemo it was simple, just install SSH and use SSHFS. Not so much with Android, at least last time I investigated it.

I didn't have a TI-83, instead I was the a-hole with a TI-85 and the serial connection kit. All those "programs" loaded from my computer, nah they weren't chemistry and geology cheat sheats, not at all.